Who Is Described in the Scientist's Letter?

[Gokul43201]

Hmm, I thought, by 'la femme', you were referring to Ada herself, and telling folks to think from there.

Well...the odds have been defied - and it's not the first time, I'm sure.

 

[arildno]

You thought I would let others bask in the glory which rightfully should be lavished on me?
Nope. I'm far too selfish for such acts of altruism.

 

[Janitor]

This was the site of the Trinity Test - the culmination of the Manhattan Project - where the first atom bomb was detonated.

In the 1990s I was on a vacation trip by car through Texas. I was making good time on the way back, and so at El Paso I decided to take a jaunt to the north, because I knew the test site was somewhere around Alamagordo. As I was in the desert a few miles shy of the town, I could see ahead of me the mountain range that is east of Alamagordo, up on top of which Alan Hale discovered the comet Hale-Bopp. I came to a road block. The man approached my car and asked through my open window where I was going. I told him, "I want to take a look at the Trinity site."

"What?" he asked.

"The nuclear bomb test site."

When I said that, he had this look on his face that told me he had no idea of the history of his part of the country.

"Uh, would you mind turning off the engine and stepping out of your car? Open the trunk. Leave your door open."

So I did. (What choice did I have? He had a handgun in a holster.) He made me walk about 50 feet away from the car, and another uniformed man walked a dog over to my car and let it sniff in and around my car. I guess they were looking for drugs. Well, it was not their lucky day, because I am not a drug smuggler.

I drove on to Alamagordo and stayed overnight. They have a narrow-gauge railroad there, and also a display of missiles next to the main road. The next day I stopped at White Sands visitors center and asked about the Trinity site. The ranger there said it is only open to the public one day a year, and naturally that was not the day, so I never did get to see it.

 

[Gokul43201]

Interesting story Janitor - I was met with similar behavior from a cop when I tried to explain to him that I was driving about a hundred miles from home, looking for the nearest IHOP. It was a phase...what can I say ?

 

[Gokul43201]

This Quiz is up - hope you enjoy it ! https://www.physicsforums.com/quiz.php?

 

[plover]

Well, to be honest, I thought like this:
"Ok, he said someone was incredibly close; that's probably the Ada Lovelace answer.
Now, it would defy all odds that the answer is Babbage (besides, I didn't manage to hook Babbage up to any of the mentioned persons), so it's probably some woman.."
(It's true I DID think of Babbage, but dismissed him )

After Gokul's response I assumed the answer almost had to be Babbage. I would have guessed him, but I thought I was barred from guessing again.

The first guess was pretty much luck. While the names Vigenere and Wheatstone looked familiar, I couldn't remember any associations for them. The other two were poets, but given that this was a science quiz, I figured I needed someone associated with science, and Ada was the scientific personage most closely associated with either of them that I could think of.

But I still defy anyone to find a Wheaties box (or even some kind of Victorian proto-Weetabix box) with Byron on it (let alone Vigenere) ...

 

[selfAdjoint]

Vignere and Wheatstone have ciphers named after them, there has to be a clue there somehow!

 

[Gokul43201]

Wow, sA - you've resurrected an oldie (although I imagine you were lead here by my link in the other thread)!

Yes, that is where the connection lies. The answer I was looking for is Charles Babbage (a cryptanalyst of no modest ability himself) - see post #25.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Is that true, that Babbage was the first to solve a vignere (polyalphabetic) cipher? Who says?

 

[Gokul43201]

Is that true, that Babbage was the first to solve a vignere (polyalphabetic) cipher? Who says?

Google gives me these (among other hits):

Friedrich Kasiski published the first successful attack on the Vigenère cipher in 1863, but Charles Babbage had already developed the same test in 1854. Babbage was goaded into breaking the Vigenère cipher when John Hall Brock Thwaites submitted a "new" cipher to the Journal of the Society of the Arts: when Babbage showed that Thwaites' cipher was essentially just another recreation of the Vigenère cipher Thwaites grew irritated and challenged Babbage to break his cipher. Babbage tried to get out of it, but eventually gave in and succeded in decrypting a sample, which turned out to be the poem "The Vision of Sin," by Alfred Tennyson, encrypted according to the keyword "Emily," the first name of Tennyson's wife[5].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigenere_cipherMy original source, however, was likely Simon Singh.

 

[neutrino]

Babbage was the first to crack the Vigenere Cipher;

Wheatstone & Babbage were close buddies, often spending weekeds together decrypting private messages in the 'personals' columns of local newspapers...along with Lyon Playfair, the 3 created the Playfair Cipher;

Babbage once sent Tennyson a letter complaining about lines in a poem that went "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born". Babbage wrote "...if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill...I would suggest in the next edition of your poem, you have it read 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment one and one-sixteenth is born'."

Arrgghh! Now I remember reading about all that in Simon Singh's The Code Book. Anyway, I look at these trivia threads long after most of the questions have been answered.

Thanks for all that trivia, Gokul.